Killer Ratings: A Susan Kaplan Mystery

by Lisa Seidman

  “Did he say anything about Sherman? About calling him?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He did say he called Michael Keller, that construction worker.”

  I looked at Peggy in surprise. “Keller went to Zack’s house?”

  Peggy shrugged. “I guess so.”

  I wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled. “But, Peggy, that means Keller could’ve killed Zack!”

  But Peggy refused to get excited. “No, I don’t think so, Susan. Zack said Keller might have some information about the murderer he didn’t know he had.”

  “Yeah, like he was the murderer.”

  “That’s not how Zack meant it.”

  “Peggy, you have to go to the police and tell them this. I told you they suspect Sherman. They’re looking for him right now.”

  “Susan, I’m sorry. But I can’t. And you promised you wouldn’t either.”

  She looked like a spoiled ten-year-old not getting her way instead of the thirty-eight-year-old producer of the number one rated television show in the country. I leaned across the table toward her, almost getting au jus on my shirt. “Why can’t we tell the police?”

  Peggy looked away from me. Her voice was so inaudible, at first I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly.

  “Because they’ll suspect me.”

  I sat back in my chair, a roaring in my ears.

  “Why?”

  Peggy took the bread off her sandwich, crumbling it between her fingers, avoiding my eyes. “When I realized Zack was in love with Rebecca, I went off the rails a bit. I did something I’m not too proud of.” I held my breath. “I started following Zack around.”

  “So?”

  “I’d drive to his house early in the morning just to see if Rebecca came out of it. I’d follow him home from work. To the supermarket. To the movies.”

  “Peggy, we’ve all gone a little nuts like that, but I don’t think the cops would arrest you over it.”

  “You don’t understand. I followed Zack back to the warehouse the night of Rebecca’s death.”

  I swear my heart stopped beating. I no longer heard the clatter of cutlery or the background restaurant chatter. Everything around me seemed to freeze, and in that sudden, imagined silence I stared at Peggy, having difficulty forming the words that seemed to come out of my mouth in slow motion. “Did he kill her?”

  “No,” Peggy said softly. “He didn’t.”

  “How do you know that? You were in your car.”

  “I just know, okay? Zack’s not like that.”

  That was the lamest answer in the world, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead I asked, “Did you kill Rebecca? After Zack left her?”

  I thought she’d get all indignant on me but she wearily shook her head. “I was too busy following him to go after her.”

  Maybe, maybe not. But she knew the police wouldn’t believe her, which is why she didn’t want me going to them.

  “So you followed Zack after he left the warehouse?”

  She nodded. “He went straight home after that. But just because I said I didn’t kill her doesn’t mean the police won’t think I stayed at the warehouse and killed her myself. I don’t have an alibi.”

  Which is exactly what I was thinking, until I remembered:

  “Sandy,” I said abruptly.

  Peggy looked at me, puzzled.

  “She didn’t say anything about seeing you when she left that night.”

  “Why should she?”

  “Because she left before Zack did.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peggy said.

  “Sandy said she came back from an appointment to do some work. She overheard Zack and Rebecca arguing, but left before he did.”

  “No, she didn’t. I saw her car there. And believe me, I would’ve seen her if she had left. Zack came out first and I followed him home. Sandy was still in the office.”

  7.

  West Hollywood, where Sandy lived, is a predominantly gay community located between Beverly Hills to the west and Hollywood to the east. It’s an upper middle class neighborhood filled with brightly painted bungalows, flowered gardens, and trendy shops and restaurants to the north, on the Sunset Strip.

  Sandy’s apartment wasn’t exactly on my way home, but somehow I found myself getting off the freeway at La Cienega Boulevard and taking it north until I reached Sandy’s street. I had never been there before, but found the address easily enough through my GPS app on my cellphone. When I had asked Peggy why Sandy hadn’t gone to the police, knowing Zack may have been the last person to see Rebecca alive, she shrugged.

  “Maybe Zack wasn’t the last person to see Rebecca alive,” she said.

  “Do you really believe Sandy killed her?”

  “You know her better than I do. Did Rebecca hurt Sandy in some way?”

  I leaned back in my chair, remembering that Rebecca was probably the reason why Ray put Sandy on probation. But was that enough to cause Sandy to batter Rebecca to death in a fit of rage? I didn’t know and I was certainly not going to share my concerns with Peggy until I spoke with Sandy.

  I pulled up in front of Sandy’s green, three-story apartment house, and stopped for a moment with the car engine idling. The exterior lights highlighted palms trees and thick beds of red, white, and blue-colored pansies and begonias. The lighted parking garage was located underneath the building, and thick shrubbery separated the apartments from a small, fenced-in pool. If I found a parking space nearby, I promised myself, I’d go in to see her. If not, I’d wait until tomorrow.

  Not twenty feet away, someone in a Toyota pulled out. Fate had decided for me, and I slid into the suddenly vacant space.

  Sandy’s voice sounded tinny and garbled as she answered the intercom next to the glassed-in front doors. “Ye—? Wh—i—t?” sounded like, “Yes, who is it?” and I answered promptly.

  “It’s Susan,” I shouted into the speaker phone. There was a pause, and then a buzzer sounded, unlocking the front door.

  Sandy stood by her opened apartment door as I exited the elevator and walked down the brown-carpeted hall. She had a puzzled smile on her face.

  “This is a pleasant surprise,” she said as she stepped aside so I could enter. She wore a green plastic Harrods apron over her jeans and red sweatshirt, looking a little like a Christmas tree ornament.

  The apartment, furnished with white overstuffed chairs and couches, smelled of cheese, tomatoes, and garlic. My mouth started watering even though I had just eaten.

  “I was washing up the dinner dishes when you called,” Sandy said. “I decided to cook in for a change.”

  “Smells good.”

  “Lasagna,” she said. “I have some left over if you want.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve already eaten.”

  Sandy shut the door after me, and I followed her into the kitchen. She moved to the sink which was half-filled with soapy dishes. The rest were drying on a pale blue Rubbermaid dish drainer. I had one just like it—only in beige—in my apartment.

  Sandy indicated the sink. “Do you mind if I finish?”

  “No, go ahead.” I leaned against the Formica counter, watching as she scrubbed a tomato-flecked baking dish.

  She didn’t look up as she asked, “Is something the matter? Or is this is a social visit?”

  “I don’t know what to call this.” I shifted uncomfortably against the counter. Sandy noticed and looked at me.

  “What is it? Something is wrong.”

  I didn’t know how to begin so I figured I might as well dive in feet first. “I had dinner with Peggy tonight. She told me she followed Zack back to the warehouse the night Rebecca was murdered. She said Zack came out of the building before you did.”

  Sandy carefully set the baking dish onto the drainer. When she finally looked back at me, her expression was unreadable. “And you believe her.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “Because perhaps she murdered Rebecca and is trying to blame someone else.”
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br />   “You don’t really believe that,” I said.

  “And I don’t believe you! You’d take Peggy’s word over mine!”

  Sandy’s sudden, angry outburst startled me. “I’m not taking anyone’s word over anyone else’s,” I replied, equally upset. “I just told you what Peggy said.”

  “And if you didn’t believe her, you wouldn’t be over here right now accusing me of Rebecca’s murder!”

  “Sandy, that’s not true! I just wanted an explanation.”

  “Not that you deserve one, but here it is. Peggy lied to you. She probably didn’t have an alibi herself so she thought she could blame me. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  Sandy and I stared at each other, breathing hard, as if we had just done ten rounds with a referee. I couldn’t believe we were fighting, or that she would overreact like this. My eyes felt hot, and I realized my fists were clenched so tightly my fingernails were cutting into my palms.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” Without another word, she led me back to the front door and barely waited until I stepped out into the hall before slamming it behind me.

  Driving back to my apartment, I went over our brief conversation in my mind. Was my tone belligerent? Had I been too accusatory? Had I automatically assumed Sandy was guilty? But no matter how I replayed our argument, I still couldn’t discover where I had gone wrong. And, yes, I did believe Peggy was telling the truth. Which meant Sandy had to be lying. Because she killed Rebecca? No way! My mind simply refused to accept that.

  As I opened the door to my apartment I checked my cellphone messages. I had spoken with my parents at work that afternoon and once again convinced them it wasn’t necessary to fly to Los Angeles to stand guard over me. I also resisted their attempts to lure me back to New York with their offers of a free trip to Europe to follow in my brother Larry’s footsteps. I told them that the show needed me more than ever, and just because I kept stumbling over dead bodies didn’t mean the next one I’d stumble over would be my own. They promised to call my grandmothers and reassure them as to my health, safety and well-being, and I hung up wondering if the rest of my life would be filled with such exhausting telephone conversations.

  The messages on my cell were from the usual concerned friends in New York and graduate school. I thought about calling Jennifer and telling her about my I-don’t-know-how-it-happened fight with Sandy, but was afraid Jennifer might take Sandy’s side. What I needed, I decided, was a plan. Too many people were getting hurt, and if I found Sandy’s behavior suspicious, then Detectives Lu and Wagner would, too. If I could find out what she was hiding maybe I could help her.

  I went into work early the next morning to make a phone call I didn’t want anyone else to hear. I would’ve called from my apartment but the number I wanted was back in my desk, and I hoped no one had been through my drawers and taken it away as they had with the death threat. Sure enough, there, in my top center drawer, was Michael Keller’s phone number. Although Linda was happy to help in my investigation, she had reluctantly given me a copy of his personnel file, knowing she could get fired for doing so. I promised I wouldn’t show it to anyone—including Jennifer.

  Dialing quickly so as not to lose courage, I waited while the phone rang four times, and then went into voicemail.

  “Hello,” said a warm, masculine voice. “You’re here, but I’m not. So leave a message and I’ll get back to you.” Beep.

  Keller’s voice sounded exactly as I imagined it would. Cute.

  “Hello, I’m calling for Michael Keller. This is Susan Kaplan, Rebecca Saunders’ secretary. I was cleaning out her office this morning and discovered a check written out to you. Do you want to swing by the office and pick it up? Let me know.” I gave him the office number and got off the phone.

  There. Too late to go back now. No one had to tell me I was playing with fire. There was no check and for all I knew Keller might ask me to mail it. I could only imagine what Wagner would have to say if he ever found out. But I knew Keller held the key to a lot of important information, and even if he was the murderer, I thought it would be worth meeting him just to see what I could find out. And if he did kill Rebecca then why was Sandy protecting him? Unless she was mistakenly protecting someone else? Ray? Charles? And if so, why would she sacrifice herself for them?

  That matter having been initiated, I then moved on to the next chore on my list. Rebecca’s office. Ray had asked me to pack it up but I had been avoiding it up to now, too creeped out to enter. The yellow police tape still blocked my way, but I peeled it off the door and, shoving my reluctance aside, stepped inside. Romulus had not yet brought in a crew to clean the office (too cheap, I supposed), and I averted my eyes from the stains on the wall near her desk (not her brains, of course they weren’t her brains), and moved to the couch opposite. While the cops had removed everything from her desk, the pile of scripts and DVDs she had stacked on her couch still remained. I went through each script and tape, but none of the names were familiar. None of the scripts, I noticed, had Rebecca’s handwritten notes on the cover page—only mine had been awarded that honor. At the top of the stack was a brief note written by Rebecca on a personalized Babbitt & Brooks buck slip. It read, “Tell agents thanks, but no thanks. R.” Easy enough to translate. Rebecca wanted me to return the scripts to each of the agents with a polite, but firm rejection letter. I had done this for Rebecca before, only signing Peggy’s or Zack’s name to the letter since no agent would understand why an associate producer was reading— and rejecting—submissions.

  But the directors’ reels were a whole different ballgame. Sandy usually wrote those letters for Ray, but there was no corresponding note to Sandy from Rebecca. I supposed Rebecca wouldn’t dare give Sandy orders, or perhaps she tried and Sandy had put her foot down. Which may be why Rebecca had complained about Sandy in the first place. Again I thought about Sandy left alone in the warehouse with Rebecca after Zack left; I thought about her barely concealed fear whenever the detectives showed up; and I searched through Rebecca’s office all the more carefully, looking for something—anything—that would point to Rebecca’s murderer and, I hoped, exonerate Sandy.

  The top of the desk was empty—the cleanest and barest I had ever seen it. The police had bagged as evidence everything that had been on the surface at the time of her murder; and the desk must have been foot deep in paperwork because, fortunately, little blood or gore had seeped onto the shiny, metallic surface.

  The handles were still sticky with fingerprint powder and I used the edge of my shirt to open the drawers. Nothing. Not a forgotten scrap of paper jammed in the corner or an incriminating message slip or even the name of the murderer finger-painted in blood. I slammed the last drawer shut with a sigh of disappointment and exited the office just as everyone else straggled in to work.

  Sandy wasn’t talking to me, although she was careful not to make a point of showing that in front of the others. Which made me realize all the more that she must have been lying about when she left the warehouse. If my accusation had truly been unfair, she would’ve gone straight to Jennifer and cried on her shoulder.

  Jennifer, in the meantime, was still miffed at me for not confiding in her about my meetings with Linda Ramsay and Detective Wagner. So the three of us spent the day being icily polite to one another, and I mournfully wondered whether the murderer had killed not only Zack and Rebecca, but my burgeoning friendship with Jennifer and Sandy as well.

  There was one benefit to Jennifer’s anger, at least. She refused to answer the phones, which ensured that I would be the one taking Michael Keller’s phone call. But I also had to deal with every crank and crazy who called about Zack’s death. And so I was, therefore, running out of patience when I was forced to abruptly end one call to pick up another left ignored by a studiously indifferent Jennifer, who was reading the fan forums on the Babbitt & Brooks website, copying their comments for Charles to read in his spare time. />
  “Babbitt & Brooks,” I snapped into the receiver.

  There was a pause, then a voice said, “Susan Kaplan, please.”

  I recognized the voice immediately as the one on the voicemail message, and my stomach lurched. Somehow I managed to say, “Speaking.”

  “Susan, this is Michael Keller calling. I got your message about the check.”

  Through the receiver I could hear cars whooshing past and an occasional honking horn. Keller sounded as if he was calling me from the middle of the freeway.

  “Yes,” I replied, my throat suddenly dry. “Would you like to stop by for it sometime today?”

  “Yeah, I could do that. Is seven o’clock too late?”

  “Seven is fine,” I said. “Do you know how to get here?” I already knew the answer of course but figured I’d best play dumb. Keller assured me he did, and we hung up. I was relieved he hadn’t asked me to mail the check, then wondered if it was because he knew the cops were looking for him and was staying as far away from his place as possible.

  The phone rang again, and I turned to Jennifer in exasperation. “That was Michael Keller,” I said. “And if you help me answer the phones from now on, I promise to fill you in on what’s going on.”

  Jennifer blinked at me in surprise then picked up the phone. I felt slightly guilty, not because I was going to give away state secrets, but because I needed Jennifer as part of my plan with Michael Keller and knew that divulging information would be the only way to get her to comply.

  She answered the phone, efficiently dealt with the person on the other end (it sounded like a professor, wondering if Charles would appear as a guest lecturer in his/her class), then hung up. Leaning over with her arms crossed on her chest, she looked me square in the eye. “Now give. Tell me everything.”

  So I did, keeping my voice down so that Peggy, Charles, and Ray, who were meeting in Ray’s office, wouldn’t hear. I told her about Zack finding Rebecca’s car in his garage, about his asking Sherman to his house to talk about the night of Rebecca’s death, and about Peggy’s confession of following Zack, ending with Sandy’s lie about when she left the warehouse that night. I hesitated about telling Jennifer the last part, afraid she’d side with Sandy against me, but Jennifer merely sat back in her chair and absentmindedly rubbed the bridge of her nose.